New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez secured one of the most consequential legal wins against a major tech company in American history, and he is already trying to turn that victory into something more permanent.
After a $942 million judgment against Meta for knowingly harming children’s mental health and concealing what the company understood about child sexual exploitation on its platforms, Torrez is working with state lawmakers on two proposed bills that would push beyond what the courts were willing to order.
The legislation, expected in the coming weeks, would strengthen online child-safety and consumer-protection rules while explicitly extending the state’s reach to AI and chatbots. That matters because the court win, while enormous, came with limits. A jury found Meta liable, a judge imposed reforms, and hundreds of millions of dollars were earmarked for youth mental-health services.
But several of the state’s most aggressive requests were denied. Torrez is now aiming at that gap.
A Major Verdict, With Limits
New Mexico walked away with $942 million and a set of hard-won reforms, but not the ones that would have mattered most to Torrez.
The judgment came in two phases. A seven-week trial ended in March with a jury finding Meta liable under New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act for misleading users about platform safety and failing to protect children from mental health harm and sexual exploitation adequately. The jury imposed the maximum available penalty: $375 million.
A judge then ordered another $567 million in August, primarily for youth mental health treatment, with the remainder directed to prevention and screening services. The court also required five years of operational changes, including age-verification efforts, stronger child-exploitation safeguards, overnight push-notification limits, and mandatory time-use restrictions for users under 18.
The judge also declined to appoint a child safety monitor or order Meta to de-encrypt Facebook Messenger messages, noting that legislators better addressed several of the more sweeping proposals. Torrez took that note seriously.
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The Undercover Operation… and What Discovery Revealed
The case started with investigators posing as children online. The internal company documents they later obtained were worse than expected.
In 2023, Torrez’s office ran an undercover operation called Operation MetaPhile. Investigators created decoy Facebook and Instagram accounts presenting as minors, some under 13 or 14, and reported receiving sexual messages, explicit content requests, and contact from adults allegedly seeking exploitation.
The state alleged that Meta’s recommendation systems directed the accounts toward unmoderated groups linked to commercial sex and that a fictional mother was able to create a page offering her 13-year-old daughter to sex traffickers and monetize it.
Those were the state’s allegations. What made the trial especially damaging was what emerged through discovery. A 2019 internal email read in court, sent to Instagram head Adam Mosseri by a member of Meta’s product team, stated that Instagram had become “the leading two-sided marketplace for human trafficking.”
Torrez described the internal record as unusual. “A lot of times, when we are dealing with corporate misconduct and we start investigating, we rarely see that kind of history of and depth of knowledge that was apparent in Meta’s case,” he said.
Meta’s Response
The company disputes the verdict, says it has invested billions in safety, and is appealing.
Meta pointed to the removal of 36 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content from Facebook and Instagram in 2025, its proactive detection tools, and teen accounts as evidence of its commitment.
“We have strict, longstanding rules against child exploitation and have invested billions to fight it,” the company said, adding: “We disagree with the ruling and will appeal.”
Mosseri testified during the trial: “We do our best to keep Facebook safe, but we cannot guarantee it.” After the $567 million order, a spokesperson said the company remained confident in its teen protection record and would continue defending itself against what it called a misrepresentation of the facts.
One point remains disputed. Torrez claimed Meta threatened to block access to Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp in New Mexico ahead of the second trial phase, something he characterized as “a bluff that was intended to either shape the court’s determination or to bully the state of New Mexico.” Whether Meta formally acted on that threat remains unclear.
What the Two Bills Would Actually Do
The proposed legislation is designed to reach places the court declined to go, and its scope is intentionally broader than social media.
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Torrez says the bills would create a stronger consumer protection framework for online platforms and update state law to cover AI and chatbots explicitly. One bill would remove existing caps on penalties under New Mexico’s consumer protection laws, giving the state more enforcement leverage. The final text, legislative sponsors, and implementation details have not been released publicly.
Torrez has discussed the legislation with Deb Haaland, the former U.S. Interior Secretary and former U.S. Representative, who supports the effort. His case for not waiting on Congress is blunt: “There hasn’t been any willingness by Speaker [Mike] Johnson to really put forward a forceful piece of legislation that would protect kids online. I think it’s a pretty straightforward case of the lobbying power of big tech on Capitol Hill.”
The AI element could become its own major front. Torrez’s office expects to file suit against an unidentified AI company in the “relatively near future” over a chatbot that children have reportedly formed emotional bonds with. The company and product have not been named, and no specific allegations have been disclosed.
Still, Torrez is explicit about the direction: the proposed framework is meant to cover where the technology is heading, not only where it has already been.
What Comes Next
Torrez is building something he expects other states, municipalities and private plaintiffs to replicate.
A separate federal trial involving a 29-state coalition against Meta was scheduled to begin in Oakland this week. Meta has estimated in court filings that potential damages across the broader state AG litigation could exceed $1.4 trillion, a company estimate in a legal filing, not an awarded figure. A second New Mexico case against Meta, focused on data privacy and civic harms, is set for trial in September.
The court-ordered reforms from the current judgment remain subject to Meta’s appeal, and Torrez acknowledges the compliance picture could shift over the five years as the appellate process plays out. The two bills still need sponsors, formal introduction, and a path through the legislature. Their political coalition beyond Haaland is still unknown.
Torrez’s stated aim is momentum. “There is substantial interest, not only with state attorneys general, but in smaller municipalities, school districts, private plaintiffs and others to look at the work that we’ve done here and to try and replicate it,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of momentum coming out of our victory in court, and the idea is to build on that momentum.”
If platforms were required to verify users’ ages before allowing access, would you see that as a fair safety trade-off, or would handing over that data concern you more?
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